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Monday, 22 October 2012

Through a Glass Darkly, and Loving It - Cathy Butler

I sometimes think I’m a bit of a wreck, physically. First, I’m
slightly deaf, which means I annoy people by asking them to repeat themselves,
especially when there’s any background noise. Then, I have prosopagnosia, or
face blindness, and so have difficulty recognizing people from their
faces alone. I generally rely on hair styles, context, clothes and voice
recognition to get by – although when I meet people in unexpected situations
these aids aren’t always available and the results can be embarrassing. (My
nadir came when I failed to recognize my own daughter, who was helping out at a
local cafe.) Oh, and I almost forgot, my memory isn’t too reliable either. At
least, it has a habit of squishing people, places and events together,
consolidating all my separate memories into one manageable reminiscence. Some might say that a person as decrepit as I am has no business writing at all,
especially for children.

On the other hand, for a writer there are
advantages to looking at the world as reflected in a funhouse mirror. You see
things that no one else has seen, at least from that angle. Witness the
novelist Henry Green: he too was rather deaf, and it was a deficit he
treasured because he found that the sentences he misheard were frequently more
interesting than what people had actually said - as in this example from a 1958 Paris Reviewinterview:

INTERVIEWER: I've heard it remarked that your work is “too sophisticated” for
American readers, in that it offers no scenes of violence—and “too subtle,” in
that its message is somewhat veiled. What do you say?

GREEN: Unlike the wilds of Texas, there is very little violence over here. A
bit of child killing, of course, but no straight shootin'. After fifty, one
ceases to digest; as someone once said: “I just ferment my food now.” Most of
us walk crabwise to meals and everything else. The oblique approach in middle
age is the safest thing. The unusual at this period is to get anywhere at
all—God damn!

INTERVIEWER: And how about “subtle”?

GREEN: I don't follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide—now
forbidden—of a Hindu wife on her husband's flaming pyre. I don't want my wife
to do that when my time comes—and with great respect, as I know her, she won't
. . .

Green was being mischievous, of course, but slight
deafness (while tedious for everyone else) does indeed offer such solipsistic
pleasures, a way of swerving one’s mind off the beaten track of polite
conversation and into the pathless wilderness of imagination. All writers need a
way of doing that: no mishearings, no mondegreens.

I've yet to find as productive a use for my
prosopagnosia, but it's sometimes pleasant to let familiar faces pass
before me in a nameless parade, especially if their owners aren't present to be
offended. It’s as if the usual compulsion to attach words to things were
temporarily suspended and one had entered a state of preverbal infancy, a
holiday from language itself. The other night, for example, I watched Stand Up to Cancer, a fundraising telethon featuring
many such unnamed celebrities, and thoroughly enjoyed the downtime. Mind you, even that
experience was interrupted by the occasional pyrotechnic display of firing
neurons as a name crackled into life – for example when that ordinary-looking
bloke sitting behind Derren Brown suddenly revealed himself as Martin Freeman
by dint of opening his mouth. (I still, however, mistook Christian Jessen for Daniel Craig.)

As for memory and its tricks – well, that’s a
subject for another post, I think, for its devious ways are both creative and
legion. I only hope I remember to write it.

Meanwhile, I feel a little sorry for those
people with twenty-twenty vision and photographic memories. They miss so much.